2023 January 24 Where our beliefs come from

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for and about Your Life Reimagined. Thanks for joining me tonight for more on recreating our own futures. Let's get started.

But first, a quick reminder: I'm not a medical professional and I'll be talking about things that I personally find useful and helpful. If you find yourself feeling really upset or depressed, please seek medical professional help or dial 911 or 988. The old number also works: 800-273-8255. If you feel you need to talk to somebody, keep it in mind. Good to know for yourself or for a friend.

If you like what you hear tonight, please leave us a Like and tell your friends, or drop me a note if you want to hear something different. We'll be continuing on with our goal setting, building upon the first steps we reviewed over the past two weeks. If you missed it, check out the videos for January 10 and January 17, 2023.

Last week we covered what happens if we just come up with some dreams and try to plan all the way from start to finish, and how it's pretty easy to get derailed. We just lose track of what's going on. Then we covered the alternative of envisioning what's actually going on, and how if we start at the end and work backwards, it helps our mind figure out how we want to do this stuff. 

This method of starting at the end and working our way back has a big advantage, because it gives our brain time and we actually get buy-in and understand where we're going. Once it gets comfortable with that, then it's a lot easier to work backwards and solve the problems as they come up.

Last week we started talking about all of that, and how that gives our brain time to adjust to this new future, and to think about ways to overcome obstacles as they arise. Then we also started talking about how our mind actually works, and how it all forms all these little automations so that things that happen all the time - like hearing an alarm clock, triggers an automatic reaction. 

Tonight we're going to go into a little more detail related to how beliefs form, and go back to the very beginning, which is the stimulus of the situation. So what's a stimulus? A stimulus is absolutely anything and everything that goes on in your life.

It could be the smell of cookies being baked, or hearing that darn alarm clock go off, or seeing something colored blue. It is simply anything around you that you can perceive. It can involve any or all of your senses, and taken by itself it really doesn't mean anything at all. When you were an infant, the first time you smelled cookies being baked, you probably thought nothing.

It was just another new smell in your life. But very quickly you started to consciously notice that same smell coming around, maybe it was every weekend, then most likely you started to form a thought about that smell. At that point, it was probably pretty neutral. It was just a recurring smell and a recurring thought. It may seem obvious, a little person learning about the world. But what comes next is super important, and literally will affect us for the rest of our lives. At some lucky point, you smelled that same smell and then you got to taste a cookie.

That tasting obviously was another stimulus, but your thoughts could now associate that smell and that taste. Something's different going on. That like or dislike was an emotional response to that stimulus and that thought. Now we’re starting to form our actual view of the world. We had this stimulus, then a thought, and now we've added an emotion. Let's assume that we like that taste. We have now started to form a belief based upon that stimulus, a resulting thought and emotion that was created at the same time after all those different thoughts.

That belief is just one of thousands of little automations that we form as people. When you smell a cookie being baked, that automation steps in and automatically decodes that stimulus into a positive emotion based upon our experience. You don't have to sit and reason it out every time like you did when you were a little tiny baby.There's a super important point here because that happened when we were truly young. It really is deeply embedded in us.

We have lots and lots of things like that. Whether you like spiders or don't like spiders, whether you are interested in the outdoors or you like noisy cities. When we were little, we formed all these different beliefs around things. If you're in the country and it's very quiet and you hear a siren, it’s very noticeable. If you're in the city and you hear a siren, it's more noise in the background. 

For perspective, a typical person can have over 50,000 thoughts per day. Let's think about that. The 50,000 times that things come to you, that your mind at some level has to deal with. Imagine if we had to sit down and reason out each and every one of those. But beliefs, those are little automations, make it possible to take far and away the majority of those and put them on automatic. That allows us then to concentrate on the unusual things and the important details in a life that is cram full of stimulus. 

Now, however, you're an adult, and you're trying to lose weight, but you just can't seem to resist those darn cookies. That is because, in part, you've been running this exact same automation in your brain for the last 20 or 40 or 60 years or more. That's why willpower rarely lasts more than a few weeks. You smell a cookie and you associate that with happiness. Now you put yourself into a stressful situation and your brain wants you to be happy.

So it searches through its internal list of what makes you happy, and what pops up but cookies. So now you understand why you think of a cookie or chocolates or exercising or whistling, whatever thing brings you a lot of pleasure, every time the situation gets difficult. It's because you've been training yourself with this association for a lifetime.

Once you get enough of these automations built up and influencing your daily actions on automatic, you're starting to define your identity, which is really nothing more than how you respond to all the stimuli around you in life. But that's really for another much larger discussion.

The biggest point for this evening is starting to recognize that some of the things, those little automations, are really running most of your life.  It's probably a lot more than you realize, and it's not necessarily bad. The cookie was a pretty simple and straightforward example.

What about the time your grandmother said money's always evil and will make even a good person turn bad? You know, perhaps you were maybe five or eight years old, but grandma always seemed to be right about people, and she was really nice. So even though she perhaps only said it a few times, she was always so serious and it always seemed so true.  It became one of those many little automations, beliefs, that you have. Now, decades later, you're trying to start your own business or ask for a raise, and you're thinking about how much money to ask for. That same little automation goes off to keep you safe, it says, but don't try and be too rich because that's what makes a good person turn evil.

Hopefully now you see why some of these little automations, which are there to keep us safe and happy, sometimes in the context of adulthood, may no longer serve us very well. That's the big takeaway for today. We all have hundreds, even thousands of beliefs, and while they all started out as apparently useful, sometimes - either because we misunderstood them at the time or because our lives have evolved, they may not serve us well anymore.

So your homework this week is to try and identify one or two things that you do, good or bad -it doesn't matter which - but take some belief, just pick one, and try and think back about how it first came into your consciousness and the circumstances around it. 

For me, for example, I do a lot of baking. I can remember going to my grandmother's house when I was perhaps five, maybe even younger, and watching her take a fresh homemade coffee cake out of the oven. She wasn't bashful about adding crumbs to the top. A lot of sugar, fresh out of the oven, cinnamon coffee cake. I can still envision that completely and totally, and it's over six decades later. That emotion and belief are so deeply hardwired into my brain. Now think about all those other things in your brain, especially things that aren't serving you well. This is why just trying to power through it with willpower rarely works.

We'll talk a lot more about this and how we actually root them out and what we do about them. A lot of them are so automated, and that's the point of this little exercise, our homework - they're so automated, we don't even realize they're there. Then we start thinking about it - that's why every time I go to the store I think a coffee cake would taste good.It's because you've been thinking that way for 60 years. 

That's why I say in the homework, be careful what you pick out because some things tend to lead to funny places. If you find yourself getting in a difficult mental place, then just stop. Sometimes we start to think about things. We get ourselves way off track and into funny corners when that happens. You may want to talk to a professional, or just pick a very different topic and try and work on that instead. This should be a fun and rewarding exercise, and hopefully make you smile or maybe chuckle a little bit about something that's not supposed to be scary or difficult.

So that's it for the evening. Pick a thought, run it down and and try to figure out where it came from, hopefully it’s at least someplace entertaining. There's a whole lot more to cover. We'll pick it up again next week. 

Remember, UKR7.com, the site where I have a list of links, places you can donate to support the people in Ukraine. There's also a link to the World Central Kitchen, WCK.org. They're a neat organization if you want to do things that are strictly humanitarian, they are totally humanitarian. They're providing meals for people in need. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others.

So if you can and you're able, please check it out. As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week and a wonderful New Year.

Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.